Subject: Measurement of the phistar distribution of Z bosons decaying to electron pairs with the CMS experiment at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV

Measurements of the Z boson transverse momentum (QT) spectrum serves as
both a precision test of non-perturbative QCD and helps to reduce the
uncertainty in the measurement of the W boson mass. However, QT is
limited at its lowest values by detector resolution, and so a new variable,
Phi*, which performs better in the low QT region, is used instead.
This thesis presents the first measurement the normalized differential cross
section of Z bosons decaying to electron pairs in terms of Phi* at
sqrt(s) = 8 TeV. The data used in this measurement were collected by the CMS
detector at the LHC in 2012 and totaled 19.7/fb of integrated
luminosity. The results are compared to predictions from simulation, which are
found to provide a poor description of the data.